Florida

"Trump’s purely symbolic shot across the bow, as an answer to all of China’s more-or-less purely symbolic boundary pushing in the Western Pacific, should, in fact, actually help the Chinese stay out of trouble, by putting them on notice that actions do have consequences, that there actually are costs to trying to repeatedly pin a clown nose on the sheriff."

"Everybody cut loose".. but be prepared to pay for it in Europe. As Martin Armstrong notes,if you dance in a bar in Brussels, you must pay a tax! Welcome to the world of collapsing socialism. This is where government get's to rip us all off to survive.

A series of stronger than expected data in recent days pushed Goldman Sachs to up their payrolls growth expectation to 200k (above the 180k expectations), but they note that while the unemployment rate is likely to drop (to 4.8%), average hourly earnings may disappoint. Of course, they add, any non-narrative-confirming misses on the data can likely be explained away by "weather effects and residual seasonality."

"The feeling I get from big donors out here in California is that... they’re shell-shocked," warns investor Marc Nathanson, who spent big in 2016, adding that he has no interest in participating in the party’s rebuilding efforts. As The Hill reports, many Democratic donors still feel burned by the party’s 2016 election losses and what they see as dysfunction in the DNC. "They’re tired," said one DNC official fingering the blame elsewhere, "they’re upset about the election, and there was significant trauma surrounding the Russians."

Having fallen to a 3-month low in October, Conference Board Consumer Confidence soared to 107.1 in November post-Trump - the highest since July 2007. This confirms Gallup's survey which saw economic confidence at its highest level since before Lehman, swinging positive post-Trump after being almost uniformly negative since Obama's election.

Meet Arty Schronce, a former "gardening blogger" for the Georgia Department of Agriculture, who suddenly found himself in charge of setting prices for billions of dollars worth of retail chicken sales despite no experience and his own admission that "his training was inadequate, inconsistent and sometimes in error."

"Yes, the parallels [with Reagan] are certainly there... I’ve been in touch with the Trump team. I’ve even written a book about Trump.... But those guys are going to be surprised. They just have no idea what they’re up against....I’ve seen it happen. There are alligators in that swamp."

Thanks to many years of accelerated growth in the program under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, 1 in 7 Americans now participate in the food stamp program. There are, however, verylarge differences from state to statein how much the food stamp program has expanded.

“I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist. The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over."